Nokia Ringtone Contest
Celedonio Miranda
The Nokia tune is a phrase from a composition for solo guitar, Gran Vals, composed in 1902 by the Spanish classical guitarist and composer Francisco Trrega.[1] It has been associated with Finnish corporation Nokia since the 1990s, becoming the first identifiable musical ringtone on a mobile phone; Nokia selected an excerpt to be used as its default ringtone.[2]
The Nokia tune first appeared on the Nokia 2010 released in 1994, under the name ringtone Type 5, showing that it was just one of the normal ringtones. The tune's original name varied in the ringtone list, listed as Type 13 on some phones, or Type 8 on others. In December 1997 with the introduction of the Nokia 6110, ringtones were each given a specific name, and the tune received the name "Grande valse". Some later Nokia phones (e.g. some 3310s) still used Type 7 as the name of the Nokia tune.[6] In 1998, "Grande valse" was renamed to "Nokia tune" and effectively became Nokia's flagship ringtone.
The Nokia tune has been updated several times, either to take advantage of advancing technology or to reflect musical trends at the time. The first polyphonic MIDI version of the Nokia tune, created by composer Ian Livingstone[7] (often mistaken as being Thomas Dolby's work),[8] was introduced in 2001 with the release of two South Korea-exclusive devices, the Nokia 8877 and the Nokia 8887. The Nokia 3510, released in 2002, was the first globally released phone to include this version, using Beatnik's miniBAE technology. The Nokia 9500 Communicator in 2004 introduced a realtone recorded piano version. A guitar-based version was introduced with the Nokia N78 in 2008, reflecting the popularity of nu-folk at the time.[3]
The Nokia N9 in late 2011 introduced a new version, which was created by in-house composer Henry Daw. This version uses a marimba for its melody, and was intended to be genre-neutral.[9] The same year, a contest titled Nokia Tune Remake was held on the crowdsourcing website Audiodraft.[10] The winning entry was a dubstep version, which was shipped on many Nokia phones from 2012 to 2013 alongside the regular Nokia tune. Another updated version of the Nokia tune was introduced in 2013, built on the same principles as the 2011 version. In 2018, a new version was introduced on HMD Global's Nokia 1 and 7 Plus, and remains in use. This was also created by Henry Daw; it was intended to be an evolution of the 2013 version while retaining similar instrumentation.[11]
Other versions have been produced for specific models. These include a slow piano version for the Nokia 8800 by Ryuichi Sakamoto,[12] and a slow guitar version for the Nokia 8800 Sirocco Edition by Brian Eno.[13]
In December 1999, Jimmy Cauty, formerly of The KLF, and Guy Pratt released the mobile telephone-themed novelty-pop record "I Wanna 1-2-1 With You" under the name Solid Gold Chartbusters which heavily samples the theme.[14] It was released as competition for the UK Christmas number one single but only got to number 62.[15] The release of this song prevented the Super Furry Animals from releasing their song "Wherever I Lay My Phone (That's My Home)" from the album Guerrilla as a single, on the grounds that it was also based on a mobile phone theme.[16][17]
The Indonesian rock band The Changcuters included the segment of the Nokia tune on their song "Parampampam". The song was included on their 2011 album Tugas Akhir and was also featured on the Nokia X2-01 for the Indonesian market.[22]
During the same time period as when he composed ringtones for Nokia, he was also a demoscene musician and submitted tracker modules to contests such as "Hovering Thru", as well as composing music with the Game Boy's sound hardware. He is currently a media producer at MTV Oy (not to be confused with the American TV channel, MTV), and rarely creates music nowadays.
In 2000, he submitted dozens of monophonic ringtones to one of the ringtone contests that Nokia ran in the MikroBitti magazine. Several, although not all, of his entries were selected and were loaded on several phones starting with the Nokia 8310 in 2001. He was also involved with creating more sophisticated versions of Nokia's own monophonic ringtones, as well as going on to compose several MIDI ringtones, though it is not known whether those were submitted to a contest or if Nokia eventually hired him under a contract.
His monophonic ringtones feature demoscene-esque techniques rarely used in the medium, such as the use of arpeggios, fast notes and "fake polyphony" (interleaving notes between other notes to give the impression that more than one channel is being used). By comparison, most other monophonic ringtones do not feature these techniques and just play simplistic melodies.
There were 1,500 entrants for the five separate contests to create regional ringtones. The crowd-sourced competition ran for four weeks, and was divided by region. You can now see the winning entrants for China, India, Latin America, South East Asia and Pacific, and Middle East and Africa.
Winners will each pick up $1,500 from a total prize fund of over $37,000. In addition, the competition provided the participants with a unique opportunity to get their work into millions of Nokia handsets where their tunes will sit alongside existing Nokia ringtones in the regions they were created for.
Creating the contemporary sound that Daw considered vital, proved the most challenging for many contestants. PhRey (Phil) from France, who had a winning entry in the South East Asia and Pacific region with Mekong butterfly 04 says:
Nokia has revealed the winner of its Nokia Tune contest, the company's search for a 21st century update to the classic "diddle-uh-duh" jingle familiar from millions of handsets, and it's quite the departure. The handiwork of 22 year old Italian sound designer Valerio Alessandro Sizzi, the Nokia Tune Dubstep Edition will show up alongside the default ringtone on 100m Nokia devices in 2012.
That's unlikely to be the case with the new dubstep version, however, which may not quite be to the taste of Nokia's more traditional users. Still, it was enough for "thousands" of people to like it and net Sizzi the $10,000 prize. You can hear all the entries here; let us know what you think in the comments below.
Though I recently gave into the iPhone, I was for many years a Nokia man. And for most of those years I contented myself with the default ring tone, known simply as the "Nokia tune." This tune, which you have heard nineteen times this week, goes something like: yada da da, yada da da, yada da da daah. This link will remind you what it sounds like if you need reminding: -content/uploads/2008/05/nokia-tune.mp3
For a long time I assumed this simple melody was Nokia's invention, but a curious musical incident made me question this assumption. I had bought a collection of (sheet) music by Francisco Trrega, the late-nineteenth-century Spanish guitar composer, and was playing through some of the pieces while a friend made dinner. At a certain cadence in a less-familiar piece titled Gran Vals, my friend came out from the kitchen and said, Isn't that a ring tone? I thought this was very clever of her to notice but passed off the similarity as a coincidence.
But as I heard the tune more and more often--especially during a year in Europe, where Nokias are popular--I really started to wonder. The tone also underwent some changes that made it sound more like the Trrega piece. Whereas the melody once was rendered as if by a rather unmusical robot, in later versions it acquired rubato (a more flexible approach to the meter), harmonization, and new instrumentations, piano on some phones ( -tune-piano-ringtone/), guitar on others. It was when I heard the guitar version--coming, appropriately, from the pocket of a Spanish tourist on Fifth Avenue, that I suspected my friend must have been right.
The somewhat uneventful denouement to this part of the story is that, on Googling "Nokia tune" a few weeks ago, I was easily able to confirm the Trrega hypothesis--something which
I am probably the last guitarist in the world to have done. Indeed, simply hearing the piece makes the source fairly obvious (the excellent recording here is inexplicably accompanied by video footage of a Swiss hotel): =1-0fn8t5AMI
Nokia hardly makes the tune's provenance a secret, devoting a paragraph to it on the company's website (chosen in 1994, used on tens of millions of phones, etc.). Older Nokia phones in fact listed the piece as Grande Valse (Frenchifying the original Spanish). Nokia has since trademarked the melody--something no one would have dared to do with, say, Beethoven's Fifth, or even with a Chopin waltz, but which the company must have justified by saying that the ring tone made Trrega famous and not the other way around.
Using classical music for branding purposes is nothing new, and the case of the Gran Vals may appear no different from that of the duet from Delibes's Lakm (famous from British Airways commercials) or Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue (United Airlines). A great many themes from classical music--Chopin's Fantaisie-Impromptu and Mozart's G-minor Symphony, to name two--have gone on to dubious glory as ring tones. It would be quite pointless to lament this outcome, as these melodies, which have long been in the public domain, were overexposed long before cell phones ever existed. And besides, wouldn't Mozart be somewhat amused to hear his themes tweeting from the front seat of a cab in, say, Bangalore, in the year 2009?
But the irony of the situation seems greater in Trrega's case, for Trrega, a composer greatly loved by guitarists but hardly famous in the way of a Mozart or a Chopin, was known to be a tremblingly shy man who could bear playing in front of only very small audiences, ideally composed of people he knew. To think that one of his pieces, and not even his most famous piece, would achieve this kind of ubiquity would have given this delicate man a very great shock. It is hard to know whether to see this second life for his little waltz (Gran is hardly the word) as a tribute to a charming composer, or as another sad little story of an artist receiving too little credit for his work. But if the latter seems to be the case, there is a simple solution. Next time that familiar chirp arises on a city street, or, God forbid, in a concert hall, we must simply think: Ah, the Trrega tune.